What is mostly not understood to many who look at spiritual paths from the outside, is that the process is an energetic one. It’s not the words, or the information, or the rituals – those are only a means to connect to higher energies. And higher energies are what develop us. What are we developing toward? Being in service to all that exists, which is the noble purpose of the human being. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

John: The first Sufi conference that I went to and there was a lady Sheikh. She had a Dhikr that was set up where she made the big circle, and then she went counter-clockwise around the circle and kept leaning into the circle a little bit, facilitating the energetic that way.

And in the very center of the circle would be music and whatnot supporting all of that, and she was carrying out another tradition energetically.

What made this thing so meaningful to me, that I got, but not necessarily at the time, was that I had been talking to an older woman that was very, very sharp, and I took it that it was like maybe her first time and it was like maybe my first time.

We were talking how we perceive and how we relate to this sort of thing kind of approach. It was a very insightful conversation we were having in terms of my take on it, and her take on things. Little did I know that she came from this tradition, and that she was very subtle and knew how to talk to me so that it didn’t disturb or something.

After that Dhikr which was an evening Dhikr, she asked me how it was. Of course, that was a question that was still like I hadn’t identified at all. I just thought she was looking around just like me or something. She then explained to me what took place in that circle, and what that Sheikh was doing energetically, and I got it, I understood it.

And then I realized, wow, she’s more than I ever thought. She had me completely fooled and she held back to a point where she developed an understanding and a trust so that when she did say what she needed to say to me, I could hear it. Otherwise, if we had been strangers or something and she would have said it, there would have been a certain resistance, but I heard it. I heard it. I heard how she heard it because we had been open and receptive to each other enough, I could understand that. In other words, this is how these notes come across.

When I first went, he carefully explained to everybody that I get my guidance at night. They hear it in a certain way, so they were coming up to me and asking me how does this work, how can you do this, without all these practices? He said, “Given a lifetime you can’t possibly have the experiences, all the experiences that you need.” Which is like a tease that you have to make a big leap where you actually have them all vibrationally.

I remember when I was fairly young in my 20s, I could get around people that smoked dope and whatnot and go off and be in some state where I just had a sense of things that I normally wouldn’t have in my normal natural state.

Did that get me anywhere? No, I was peeling onions over and over and over and over, and that actually was counterproductive because it took me out of the overall vibrationalism. I never could understand that. I always was enamored when I would get into this altered state and do that, and I would think that that was important, but all it tended to do was keep me outside of a greater overallness that I carry naturally, from actually admitting it or accepting it, because it was too subtle.

It’s nice they make it something you can wrap your hands around or something. But you can’t – it’s that subtle.

Both of them play with this quality, and they both have the duties and they just perform their duties. It’s not a question about, okay, I’m doing this because I decided that this is interesting and I want to be a plumber and this is my way of being a plumber. Uh uh, they’re both following their duties; they have to be surrendered to that. Whether you take it in or you don’t take it in, they have to be surrendered to that.

If a teacher can’t just be doing their duties, then they’re scurrying because that’s where abuse can come in. But if they’re just doing their duties, looking at something that they’re listening to and being directed to, it’s a very energetic subtle life.

And I like the deep statements: that God is the hidden treasure that longs to be known. And so I guess we are the means by which the eyes and the ears can kind of happen. All of it, of course, from a hiddenness put into action, into motion, but still the hiddenness, still the emptiness, still the stillness.

Both of them aiming and pointing to something that lets go and lets go and becomes emptier and emptier and emptier and emptier and emptier. And it being a note that you can best hear to get into that real-depth emptiness.

That’s a devotional path, just like the Naqshbands are a devotional path. That’s why there’s the statement: “I don’t know what you are, but until you become less than the dust at my feet…” meaning you have to merge into something.

It’s hard to do. It’s like in this game of throwing everything out there into the multiplicity and then you have to come back to the simplicity. Everything seems to be against you and yet you do it. Yet you recognize the unrecognizable. And you have to do it with dignity. You have to do that holding that inner quality, not trying to act like, can somebody do it for you or something.

And it all does come through you. All is given, but you have to hold it. And in that regard, there’s really no difference, it’s just a question of the listening center, or I should say, the way that it works.

You have to look at your dreams as you have them and you will recognize that what you are is a reflection of your experiences, the experiences that you’re touched with. And your dreams will reflect that. Your dreams initially give you a little better access, but not much better because they’re still reflections, but they get better and better as you polish the heart more and more, or as you “tune the rabbit ears.”

The key is to not to get too thrown around to the point where you don’t stand on your own two feet, because a human being’s meant to be very, very powerful, but how do you be powerful and not go around with your chest out and big ego?

In other words, he’s always passing things to a higher and higher and higher quality of a touching. And when you’re following a teacher, it gets to a point where the teacher passes you on to his teacher, and his teacher to his teacher; you keep climbing the vibration. It’s a quality.

In other words, you come to lose yourself, and each way has to work at that in its own capacity. How is it that you finish things? Certain things are done with an aspect of ego that you confront and deal with in terms of your will. You have to be very, very careful of that because a wonderful experience at a depth inside of yourself can bring all of that out, and you don’t necessarily have to live it out on the outer. How do you let go in each particular case?

I mean I’m a little thrown around because I’m sitting with something in which there is a horrible thing that’s going on in this area that I can actually perhaps do something about. If I looked at it from maybe more of the will and the Chisti thing, I might be inclined to think I have to do this.

But if I look at the pain of that, and how it blurs something, and how it keeps me on a tangent, then I come to realize that there might be a subtler way – energetically. It’s just different ways of finding the scale of things, the note of things, the music on a vibrational level, differently.

It may be the music is more literal, initially, and then eventually it’s like it goes beyond the music. A human being is fragile, and you have to somehow or another break through where you disintegrate things into a chaos. You have to pull out the will, the something of a conviction of yourself, and yet at the same time, if you don’t hold it in a secret, and you don’t hold it in a proper way, it blows up too. It’s powerful, but then it blows itself up by being too something or another.

How do you accommodate that so that it flows, and you allow Creation to have its input in there – which is everything else? So you could say that it’s everything else, from the dense on up – and it’s all important.

To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: The Hidden Treasure

Jeane:In my dream it feels like I’m living in a room on an estate. Everything seems to be right there for me. I’ve had a baby; I think it’s a male, but I’m not sure. I think the father is Jack Nicholson, or someone like him; he visits occasionally – by coming down from the sky.

When I had the baby, I didn’t really know the father’s true nature, but he’s a bit on the dark side. When he visits, I always keep myself between the baby and him.

The next time he visits, I find myself swirling around in this giant, shallow sink, and I think that’s when I wake up.

John: I saw the meaning of this dream right off the bat, but the difficulty is, how do I describe it?

You’re dealing with a force in the outer world (represented by Jack Nicholson) that’s part of the ego-identity illusion. You also have the reciprocal, inner force, in the form of the baby. You’re standing in between them, protecting the baby.

For whatever reason you’ve chosen the image of Jack Nicholson to represent the outer world, perhaps because he has such a powerful identity.

Jeane: It’s almost like I want to start taking the baby out into the world, but I feel confined a bit by the Jack Nicholson energy.

John: Exactly. This image is another example of “solitude in the crowd,” or “head in the heavens, feet on the ground,” or however you’d say that. You’re using an image that has the schematic of this dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical, or the inner and the outer. The baby represents an essence, and Jack Nicholson represents an ego-type, external identification, and you’re caught in between.

So you’re neither the essence, nor the identification and, as a result, you’re in a state of amnesia. The baby is the unconscious part of you, and Jack Nicholson is the part that tries to keep involving you in making choices based in personal indulgences (psychologies, old patterns, etc.) in terms of your relationship to people and things around you.

It’s much like your dream earlier in the night (see The Lost Essence), in that you’re trying to understand how to make a fundamental shift that, really, all humans should be working toward. This is a shift from being based, as a being, in the personal, egocentric “I’m separate” view, where life consists in our personal reactions to events in the outer world, to being present in the outer world, but based in the inner, universe-connected part of us.

Your dreams don’t have the specificity of an answer, they just show the conundrum from an overall perspective, which is the way the feminine sees things (the masculine would present this issue through specific details). The image shows you have the sense of something so much more (the baby), but at the same time you’re not quite able to catch up with it because you also have the circumstances of this outer scenario (JN) that you’re taking into account.

So how do you pull the two together? How does everything come back to just the essence and yet, at the same time, you don’t destroy the creation (physical world) with the light. In other words, how do exist in the essence without disturbing anything?

Very unusual and peculiar. See, it’s very much like that “poof” dream at the beginning. The interesting thing about experiencing a dream image like this is it keeps you from taking things too seriously because, by and large, you always have the inner echo to remind you that the outer world is just an appearance or mannerism.

There’s always something behind the mannerism or appearance that has to do with where it’s coming from (the essence). The more we connect with the essence of things, the harder it becomes to take the appearance or the mannerism of the outer literally. If we catch up with the essence, on an inner level, then we’ll see what’s causing everything in the outer world to unfold.

When we experience life at this deeper level, it’s like we’re creating, or co-creating, the world we experience. No, we’re actually creating. This co-creation thing isn’t quite right, because we are God. It’s hidden inside us. We can’t not be everything.

God divides Himself completely, which means that there’s no division. God is always whole and complete in and of Himself. If we can catch up with it in us, then we’re also catching up with that which is at the center of the universe, which is the essence of everything.

We’re the Big Bang, or whatever science wants to call it. We’re all of that, but it’s hard to denote because we’re caught in a magic trick, like in your dream, where you have the baby, which is the essence, and you have the raw energy of things that capture your attention, which is the Jack Nicholson outer, and you’re somewhere in between.

So, we’re always caught in something like that. Our relationship to the outer is informed by our five senses, but our relationship to the inner comes through an emptiness connection from the heart, or from the essence. It’s that inner part that’s always making a journey, not what we’re doing in relation to our outer environment.

Again, it’s a big overall dream, at such a level and of such magnitude that it’s like a trance. It’s not something that you can take and say “I’ve got it!” in one fell swoop. But it is a good representation of how things really are.

John:The first thing I noticed when I woke up was my physical feeling – it felt like I had been punched in the nose, to the point where it seemed I could taste blood. This was a weird sensation that I’ve never had before.

I also had the sense that in the dream, when I was opening the envelopes, I was at a deep, deep level inside. I felt okay in what I was doing at that point because I had a sense of knowing what was required. I mean, I was playing around with gauging the sizes of these envelopes, and filling in the confirmations, but it wasn’t until I started lowering the vibration – basically into the physical level – that I began to feel guilt about what I doing.

Then I began to imagine other people witnessing what I was doing and I felt even worse. At that point I had the feeling that I was cowering, because, obviously, what gives me the right to properly take into account everything in terms of the envelopes and the required confirmations – for other people?

So how can I explain that sense of knowing, of wholeness, that I had in the beginning, to those living in a world of separation, i.e., the other workers and the people at the library? I mean, as I woke up I had no idea what I was going to say to the people who stopped me. I had given the contents of these envelopes, with all different names on them, at the entrance to a place where you can only bring in what belongs to you.

So, this dream has a very interesting meaning to it, in that it shows that I need to be absolutely sure that everything I do has no presumption to it in any way. In other words, for me to not be presumptuous means that however I perceive something at a deep inner level, it must be carried all the way through – to the outer, physical world – intact.

I can’t allow the spirit energy to come down and be confused by me when it hits. If I have a knowing at this deep, inner level, where I can somehow have a sense of what other things require, it also means that I’m out in the open because in that space everything is known. It’s just like being an integrated part of the whole. But if I don’t catch up to the whole of it, then my shortfall is seen as deviation. The key is to get so that I’m no longer causing the deviation.

Everything flows from the top down, or from the inner to the outer, and needs to be opened up in a particular way, for a particular reason. The more we are able to open it up without deviation, the less disoriented and separated things will be.

On a microcosmic level, I’m still seeing myself as individual. To get beyond that, I have to go inside myself and open up these other levels; otherwise I’m always acting in an individual way. The view of separateness is an illusion.

I have to go inside to see the bigger picture, and then bring that all the way through to the outer. It’s like in your dream (see A Quality of Consciousness), you wanted the light switches to change the lights the whole way through, not just track something.

I’m just catching up with how, and who, and what I’m meant to do to be free of any presumption. I can’t do that unless I catch up with the higher self and bring it all the way through – I have to live it.

The dream is saying I haven’t done that yet. I’m not surrendering everything I am. It shows something in my nature is still interceding in some unconscious way. Only when I have totally let go will I have the right to look into the mirror of that which is intended (the higher self). Only when I quit identifying with the lower self completely will I get aligned.

Until then, I’m being presumptuous to think that I have any right at all, except to open my mail and my mail only (because on a larger level, it’s all my mail). I must not pay attention to anyone else’s path (mail).

If you start paying attention to anyone else’s path, how are you going to see what’s going on inside yourself? So, if I do pay attention, I’m setting myself up for consequences, and I’m not prepared yet to face those consequences.

So I had to open my eyes. It is truly that I am as a thought of God – that is how I’m to find myself. I haven’t done that yet. I will be shown from within all there is that I am to know and do. I must never forget that. Whatever it is that I see or think about is contaminating to that; it’s an outer view.

So, this dream is saying that I’m being irresponsible. I haven’t caught up with the bigger picture yet, so everything I’m doing now is only an echo of what can be brought through. I’m not fully taking into account the bigger picture and I’m not taking full responsibility. My actions (with the mail) are still affecting others, because I don’t know who “others” are yet.

I don’t see “others” as completely myself and, because I don’t, I have no right to step into their shoes. What the dream is saying is that I’ve stepped into their shoes, and I’m not flowing properly, so I will be held accountable and have to pay the price if, in my undertaking, I’m unable to take everything into account.